Egypt

“What happened on June 30 happened, the defeat came to pass, and it was then that I started to take the subject seriously. It’s true that the book isn’t about the revolution and its defeat but it is haunted by the political through the discussion of sleep and its attempt to escape the conventional portrayal of sleep as a surrender, a laziness, an anti-activity.”

“He was later to recall that he and his siblings had inherited four feddans of land on the death of their father, but that he had ceded his share to his mother and younger brothers, who worked it and lived off it, and would supply him in exchange with grain and ghee. But no effort was made to establish the veracity of these claims and they do not seem to match with the life he led in Alexandria.”

This year, at least three significant memoirs are forthcoming in translation, all of them intimately relevant to women’s lives in 2018, from #metoo to intersectionalism and global solidarity to the fraught spaces between the performance and experience of motherhood.

“Currently I’m trying to finish a nonfiction book on my trial and time in prison. Starting with my own experience, it looks at the broader issue of literary language vs. the language of the law, and asks why literature goes to the courtroom.”

On Monday night, one of the glitteriest and most well-respected awards of the Egyptian literature season announced its winners. Among the Sawiris Cultural Prize awardees are Youssef Rakha’s Paulo and Mohammad Abdelnaby’s In the Spider’s Room, which is set to appear this fall in Jonathan Wright’s translation.

Not that I was usually punctual, but because the traffic was unexpectedly light along the corniche, flowing so smoothly a passenger in the microbus kept saying, “What’s up?”—unconvinced by any of the answers of the other passengers, commenting on them: “For sure, it’s something else,” without adding a different answer.

“These days, he was spending most of his nights glued to the news bulletins reporting on the erupting revolution in Egypt. There was hardly a morning when he managed to get even one or two hours of sleep. It was during one of those rare and fitful moments of rest that the phone rang.”